A rich modulation scheme based transceiver is designed and implemented with throughput and error rate being given a high priority in order to target the continued exponential growth in the demand of data traffic ranging from intrachip high speed busses to metropolitan scale data center interconnects. A thorough analysis of the selection of key design details is performed both through analytical derivations and measurements in both an electrical and an optical channel that have not been previously done. This work also work merges optimization techniques and introduces some that has not been used in previous work. This resulted in a transceiver achieving 250 Gbps, 3.5e-4 BER, spectral efficiency of 5.8 b/s/Hz, and an estimated power consumption of 5.1 pJ/b , qualifying it be superior to prior art as well as suitable for both low power and high throughput applications in both coherent and non-coherent flavours of transceivers.